Film Commentary by Alex Good

House of Dracula (1945)

*. Choose your metaphor — running on empty, out of steam, shot its bolt, jumped the shark — but the great initial run of Universal horror films ends here.
*. Once again we have a collection of the usual suspects: Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, the Wolf Man, plus a Mad Doctor and a Hunchback (I’m taking these names from the theatrical poster). Though the Mad Doctor is a good guy for most of the movie (meaning until he gets infected with tainted blood from Dracula), and the Hunchback isn’t a villain at all but a kind and beautiful woman.
*. I guess this is a sequel to House of Frankenstein, though there’s no explanation at all for how Dracula and the Wolf Man came back to life. What makes this odd is that they do try to maintain continuity with the demise of the Monster in the earlier film, as he’s found still clutching on to the skeleton of Dr. Niemann in a cave under the bog he sank into.
*. Pity the Wolf Man. He has the biggest part among the three icons in both this movie and House of Frankenstein but he doesn’t get title billing. Dracula has a bit more to do here but still disappears half-way through the film. As usual, the Monster is just a slab of dead meat to be strapped on to a table and brought back to life so he can kill everybody that needs to be killed in the last five minutes of the movie before dying, again, in another collapsing building. At this point he’s not even a character but a plot device.

*. Pity the hunchbacks. In House of Frankenstein the hunchback Daniel was supposed to have his brain transplanted into that of Lawrence Talbot, but Dr. Niemann reneges on the deal so Daniel kills him, only to be thrown out the window to his death by the Monster. In this movie the hunchback Nina is supposed to be cured by Dr. Edelmann but he gets tainted blood from Dracula and kills her before tossing her body into a cave. No rehab for the disabled!
*. You know you’re in trouble when all of your leads in an ensemble film are upstaged by a background player. In this movie it’s Skelton Knaggs, the odd duck who plays Steinmuhl. He steals every scene he’s in.
*. That’s not so hard though, given how dull a film this is. Lon Chaney is still moping around wanting to die. John Carradine’s Dracula is one of the wimpiest versions of the Count ever. Dr. Edlemann (Onslow Stevens) is a boring do-gooder who just wants to run a rehab clinic for monsters before he goes all Rotwang.
*. What’s really missing here is that zany, tongue-in-cheek spirit of fun that animated all the earlier Universal horrors. We’re just going through the motions here and it’s clear nobody has any idea what to do with these characters any more. Most franchises have a tendency to run past the point of exhaustion, and this was no exception. The only thing left to do was make fun of the whole thing — and they’d even need to bring in assistance, in the form of Abbott and Costello, to do that.